Majid Heidari

Richard Rorty believes that philosophy in the West is the result of a conflict between religion and science. In fact, philosophy seeks to clarify the border between religion and science, so neither of them would be able to overstep its explanatory or predictive potentialities. He remarks that we do not have such a thing as philosophy in the East. This paper intends to ask two questions: what is the nature of the comparable conflict in an Eastern country, Iran, and what are its effects on aesthetic studies? I will draw on the idea of the conflict between theology and mysticism. The main difference between these two sides is the methods each uses to achieve the truth: literal and symbolic interpretation. This conflict happens inside religion and not between religion and science. Consequently, all aspects of society would assemble under the influence of a single paradigm, religion, that dominates all other aspects, including philosophy and science and their practitioners. Nevertheless, with the introduction of modern science and philosophy, and also the historical exhaustion of mysticism, there is a new type of conflict. Now, religion finds itself jointly in conflict with both modern philosophy and science. What is at the center of this conflict is aesthetics.

One of the main features of narratives is sequentiality, which is normally related to the sequence of events. In this paper, we intend to show that we can also find another source for sequentiality seen in narratives, i.e., language. In the present study, we will attempt to examine the validity of this supposition that there is strong relationship between the sequentiality we find in narratives and the sequentiality of language. Meanwhile, we will use the ideas of Paul Ricoeur and Heidegger, regarding the narrative and temporality respectively. Also, we will focus on Halliday’s ideas of language and cohesion. Halliday is a distinguished linguist known for his Functional grammar. On one side, we will review Ricoeur’s supposed parts of narratives; episodic or chronological and configurational or nonchronological. He takes episodic as the actions which are “in” time, i.e., he considers the nature of episodic aspect as the sequence of events. On the other side, we will use the idea of cohesion in Functional grammar, to prove the supposition that sequence in the nature of language is prior to the idea of sequence in actions. In fact, every action is accounted to be sequential or is narrated as a story partly, because of language; because language has this potentiality intrinsically to be sequential and express accounts of actions sequentially.